The upcoming Spicebird 0.7 will support iGoogle applets. You will be able to add iGoogle's applets to Spicebird's home screen, along the current Applets. Most of the current applets on iGoogle work on Spicebird.

You can add an applet by dragging its image on the "Add Stuff" page in iGoogle, into the Google Applet in Spicebird. The image on the right shows a Google Maps applet added to Spicebird's home screen.

Why is it important? iGoogle offers thousands of applets that provide you information and let you access a wide range of services like Maps, Calendar, Sms, weather at a single place. This is precisely what our home screen currently does for services accessible via Spicebird. Now, a typical user would also want to have access to other services spread across the web. So, instead of creating an applet for each of these discrete servies / information that Spicebird in itself does not provide, it is better to add support for a platform like iGoogle which can provide such services. The new Google Applet in Spicebird does precisely that. The screen shot below shows Spicebird home screen containing a Maps, a Date and Time and a Weather applet.

How does it work? iGoogle provides an API for creating applets, using which any one can create an applet that provides access to services on their web site. Spicebird provides its own implementation of this API and places it in a minimal browser environment within the applet. The API calls made by an iGoogle applet will be served by Spicebird's google applet API. Hence this does not require any porting of applets from iGoogle to Spicebird. However there might be a problem with some applets due to controlled environment in which it runs for security reasons, but there would be continuous refinements to make it work with all widgets.